Vera rose but could not quite straighten up. She put her hands to the small of her back and massaged herself. Charles got off the train and saw Vera walking past a window, only the top of her head visible until she turned to him, but apparently did not see him. He hobbled achily up and down the platform.
The air outside seemed composed in strata, dry upon moist upon dry, channels of cool air cutting through the warm, a confluence of sluggish gray rivers. The angles in the lightening sky seemed wrong. A curtain hung in pleats in the east, fabric worn to translucence, ragged across the horizon, black lines like dangling threads to the earth. Charles stood still, facing north, and watched the sky moving east. Turning south, his face clammy, his hands cool, it looked to be moving to the west. He rubbed his eyes and opened them on the woman with the heavy sack. She was crossing the street on the other side of the station. Her clothes were suddenly bright against the dark sooty orange brick of the nearest building.
He followed her across the street and saw her enter an alley. Vera had silently joined him, and they walked to the mouth of the alley: it appeared to lead to a kind of inner court, as the immediate passage was dark, while the farther parts of it were lit up with the mineral colors of the sky. They waited a moment, then walked the length of the alley, the end of which was indeed a small courtyard. They glanced about for the woman — why, Charles didn’t yet exactly know, still the demon-naif though his role as an agent of the MCPS was beginning to fizz in his hands and feet like returning blood — even called out a greeting, as if to an old friend, but saw nothing, heard nothing. Liquor in crates was stacked ten feet high around them, lining the walls, three or four crates deep. It was a lot of liquor, he thought, for a small town, but there was evidently no place else to get it: a wet town in a dry county surrounded by other dry counties. Local temperance gangs had complained — these rag-ends of thoughts dragged through his foggy memory — of the violence and despair the place attracted, its twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, the tremendous volume of its off-sale business, and its reputation as a gathering place for foreign radicals. The MCPS — but not Charles — had swung into action then, getting the court to limit the saloon’s commerce to liquor consumed on the premises between nine in the morning and five in the evening. The proprietors had suggested that they lived and worked in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and would therefore conduct their business as if it were indeed their own. If we leave the place unguarded, they argued, some goddamn teetotaler will burn it down. They openly defied the ruling.
Charles became entangled in the phrase: some goddamn teetotaler will burn it down, and Vera remarked the vacancy of his face by snapping her fingers in front of it. He mumbled what he’d been thinking, and that he had never been able to sleep on trains, and that travel was deranging even in the best circumstances, then finished the thought: The sheriff, decried in the only state-approved newspaper in town — there had been two others but they had been shut down by a senator, or rather by his friends on the MCPS, after editors of the newspapers under scrutiny had refused to stop running stories critical of the senator — as a “half-breed Finn,” said he would close the saloon only if he was absolutely forced to do so. The MCPS had decided to withhold judgment until they had taken sufficient counsel, heard from everybody, deliberated carefully and thoroughly, and allowed the saloonkeepers to dig themselves more deeply into their already dark and spacious graves. We will let them fall asleep in this bed they have made for themselves up there, Triangle McGee had informed him. It’s always much more effective to beat down a bedroom door, so to speak, and haul someone squealing out of dreamland and that nice quilted comforter their grandma made for ’em.
That was where things stood, or at least had stood. Things, it was assumed, were different now that there was an NPL speaker in town.
The saloon’s back door was slightly ajar. Vera and Charles stood for a moment before it, heard voices inside, and walked in. It was quite dark. A single light hung low over a long table, and another over the bar, illuminating a man with his foot on the rail and a woman behind the bar with her arms folded. Rejean Houle stood in the darkness between the two cones of light. The two Wobblies who had come to Saint Paul to talk to Vera, Joe, and the older man whose name she had never learned sat at a table in darkness so deep they were nearly invisible.
“Morning!” Vera called out, over-brightly. The man and the woman looked over. “Are you open?”
They smiled, both man and woman, at the same time, and Vera took it as an encouragement. She walked toward them, smiling, Charles following.
“Just what I was wondering,” he said pleasantly.
“Who you all are,” said the man, “is the question.”
Charles set his bags down. “Charles Minot.”
“Pair in the front door, pair in the back. Must be a raid.”
“Ray John Howell,” said Rejean Houle.
“All right for starters,” said the man. “What do you do, Charles?”
“Friends call me Chick.”
“What do you do, Chick?”
“I have done many things.”
“You sound like an Indian, but you don’t look like one.”
“Long train ride,” said Charles, alarmingly in the manner of a vaudeville Indian. He could act and lie as recklessly as he wished. The stage was wide open. There was absolutely nothing at stake beyond the preservation of Vera’s well-being, if and when Daisy was arrested for her speech, and if and when Vera took her place. “Thirsty. We not ourselves yet.”
The woman sniffed a kind of laugh and the man smiled what appeared to all concerned to be an acknowledgement — one not lost on Charles, who heard it as applause.
“One of the many episodes of great interest and excitement in my life has been the racing of motorcycles. I was associated with a shop in San Francisco, Beveridge’s, which is where I. hail from.”
“The racing of motorcycles? You don’t say. What’s that like?”
“It get old, like everything,” said Jules.
Vera was concerned at the continuing attempt at comedy, so concerned she turned fully around and stared at him.
“What bring you here, chief?” asked the man, adopting the tone.
Charles, glancing at Vera, stepped sideways into the light. “We are inspecting the weights that the millers and the elevator people and the railroads are using.”
The woman sighed and Charles looked closely at her. Her face was more clearly lit now and his eyes had adjusted: it was the woman with the sack and she looked like Vera.
“You’re not a Kolessina, are you?” he asked, coming closer. “Family down around Muscatine, Iowa?”
“No,” said the woman incredulously. “Why?”
“You look like my associate here, don’t you agree?”
Charles tugged gently on Vera’s arm, and she came into the cone of light.
“I don’t see it,” said the woman.
“Nor do I,” said Vera.
Charles chose that moment to try a character. “We’re subcontracting with Pinkerton’s.”
The woman looked at him as if to say, I do not look like you or your associate, and you know I do not. But this was not necessarily a hostile or even a guarded look — rather a recognition that a gamble had been taken the stakes of which would not be completely and immediately reckoned, much less lost.
“Miss Kolessina is a Russian,” said Charles. “Allow me to pause provocatively here, and then put quote marks around that ‘Russian,’ for even more emphasis. She’s a RUSSIAN,” he shouted, “and she works for Pinkerton’s! What do you think about that?”